What happens next: How to reverse ad fraud

The&Partnership and m/SIX have long taken seriously the growing issue of advertising fraud: a problem which has for several years represented a threat not just to the brands and media owners we work with – but also to the future of the advertising industry itself.

As the youngest of the “M”s at GroupM, and the only “M” born in the age of addressable media, m/SIX has taken a specialist interest in advertising fraud – digging deep into the best practices, policies and available technologies in order to pioneer a new approach to brand protection in the programmatic era.

Last year, we partnered with ad verification specialists Adloox to conduct an in-depth piece of research into the real scale and cost of ad fraud, suspecting the problem to be significantly larger than previously reported. The study, conducted across a robust 200bn daily bid requests, 4bn ad calls and 10bn ad impressions a month, for a period of 12 months, showed that the real scale and cost of ad fraud has until now been significantly under-reported:

‣ Previously believed to cost advertisers $7.2bn globally each year (according to the ANA’s ‘2014 Bot Baseline Report’), the actual cost of advertising fraud is $12.48bn (nearly twice as high)

‣ To put it in context, this means nearly 20% of total display and video adspend in 2016 ($66bn) was wasted on fraudulent Advertising placements